The Real Banned Books

Editor’s Note—October is banned book month, which usually involves liberal bookstores extolling the virtues of books like The Handmaid’s Tale that have never been banned in any meaningful way. However, there’s an entire library of books that have been banned by governments or are out of print and extremely hard to buy. Frontier doesn’t endorse all of the ideas in these books; we merely advocate for freedom of speech and thought.

The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

—James Burnham

First published in 1943, James Burnham’s scintillating The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom is a cold study of political power without the milquetoast slogans. Drawing on Machiavelli, Mosca, Pareto, Michels, and Sorel, Burnham argues that every society is ruled by an organized minority, regardless of what they tell the populace. Democracy survives not because elites have exited, but because rival elites compete, institutions restrain power, and citizens still have the means to displace their government. The book exposes the myths governments use to justify command while defending liberty, grounded in a realistic understanding of how men and institutions behave.

For years, the American editions vanished from bookstores, making the book a cult classic passed among conservatives, political realists, and students of elite theory. The original John Day and later Gateway copies can be scarce and costly, giving The Machiavellians the aura of a forbidden tome. More neglected than suppressed, with those original editions out of print, a Lume Books paperback appeared in 2020, and digital or used copies remain readily obtainable today.

Storm of Steel

—Ernst Jünger

First published privately in 1920, Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel is the fiercest memoir of the First World War. Drawn from diaries Jünger kept as a German officer, it follows him through trench raids, bombardments, gas attacks, repeated wounds, and the slaughter of the Western Front. Jünger writes with an unnerving coolness. He neither offers a pacifist sermon nor hides the terror, exhilaration, comradeship, and violence of battle. That refusal to supply an easy moral has made the book admired and condemned for a century.

Storm of Steel is not itself out of print. Penguin continues to publish Michael Hofmann’s acclaimed modern translation. The scarce versions are the early editions—particularly the 1929 English translation by Basil Creighton and copies of Jünger’s earlier, less-revised text. Those volumes have become collectors’ items because Jünger repeatedly altered the book, softening some passages and changing its tone. Readers seeking the original voice must hunt down used book catalogs, archives, and expensive antiquarian copies. A new edition from Passage Press retains the original prose.

President Roosevelt and the Coming of War, 1941

—Charles A. Beard

Published in 1948, Charles A. Beard’s President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 argues that Franklin Roosevelt planned to enmesh the US in war. Using official records and diplomatic communiqués, Beard posits that Roosevelt publicly preached peace while, behind the scenes, steering the country toward war with Germany and Japan. He presents the intervention as a well-thought-out foreign policy plan rather than an unavoidable conflict. The book became a foundational text of American revisionist history and one of Beard’s final and most controversial works.

The original Yale University Press edition went out of print, and for years the book was available only in libraries, from used dealers, and as expensive secondhand copies. The disputation of the heroic Roosevelt narrative kept it well out of mainstream history readers’ hands. Archon Books reissued it in 1968, and Transaction Publishers revived it again decades later. Routledge now lists that edition for sale, but original Yale copies remain prized artifacts of a fierce postwar argument over presidential power, secrecy, and war.

The Camp of the Saints

—Jean Raspail

First published in France in 1973, Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints is a dystopian novel about a vast flotilla carrying migrants from India to the French Mediterranean coast. As the ships approach, French institutions and citizens debate whether the country can defend its borders without abandoning its humanitarian principles. The government hesitates, institutions fracture, and the crisis spreads beyond France. Raspail uses the imagined landing to examine mass migration, national identity, demographic change, authority, and the confidence of Western civilization. Readers have treated it as satire, prophecy, political allegory, and polemic.

Charles Scribner’s Sons published Norman Shapiro’s first English translation in 1975, followed by an Ace paperback in 1977. Those editions disappeared, so they are often sold for hundreds of dollars on the secondhand market. In many ways, it became the ultimate banned book. After years of requests, Vauban Books published a new English translation in 2025 by Ethan Rundell, ending the book’s long absence from the English-language market, while the original editions remain highly sought after.

The Great Betrayal

—Ian Douglas Smith

Published in 1997, The Great Betrayal is the political memoir of Ian Douglas Smith, the last prime minister of Rhodesia. Smith recounts his early life, wartime service, rise in politics, Rhodesia’s 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence, international sanctions, the Bush War, and the negotiations that produced Zimbabwe in 1980. Smith defends his government’s decisions and argues that Britain, South Africa, and Rhodesian leaders abandoned commitments made during the conflict. He also gives his assessments of British officials, nationalist leaders, Robert Mugabe, and Zimbabwe’s first decades.

John Blake Publishing issued the original 418-page hardcover in 1997. That edition later went out of print and became difficult to find, with clean or signed copies commanding high prices from specialist dealers. An expanded version appeared in 2001 as Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal and the Dreadful Aftermath, adding material about Rhodesia after the fall. John Blake issued another edition in 2008, and the text has remained available electronically. Original copies of The Great Betrayal, however, remain scarce and collectible, particularly in their dust jackets.

Revolt Against the Modern World

—Julius Evola

First published in Italy in 1934, Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World views history through the lens of Traditionalism. Evola explores the “world of Tradition,” organized around sacred authority, hierarchy, ritual, and transcendence, and contrasts it with modern society, which he describes as materialistic, egalitarian, secular, and detached from higher principles. He surveys symbols, kingship, initiation, caste, war, and relations between temporal and spiritual power, as well as decline across ancient, medieval, and modern civilizations. Evola draws on cyclical theories of history and the Hindu concept of the Kali Yuga.

The original Hoepli edition went out of print and became a scarce collector’s item. Evola published a revised and expanded Italian edition in 1969, which became the basis for later translations. English readers had no complete edition until Guido Stucco’s translation was published by Inner Traditions in 1995. That edition brought the work into regular English-language circulation and remains available. Early Italian printings and the first English hardcover are sought after by collectors, while later paperbacks are readily available.

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution

—Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama published Our Posthuman Future in 2002, 10 years after proclaiming that liberal democracy represented the endpoint of humanity’s ideological evolution. Biotechnology forced him to reconsider this thesis. The Human Genome Project neared completion, cloning had moved into laboratories, antidepressants were reshaping personality, and researchers anticipated genetic selection, longevity, and biological enhancement. Fukuyama argued that liberalism might be defeated not by a competing political doctrine but by technologies capable of altering the human beings for whom liberal institutions were designed. Equality and natural rights, he argued, depend upon a shared human nature beneath differences of talent, status, and wealth. Genetic engineering could fracture that common foundation by creating designed traits, inherited advantages, or biological classes. Fukuyama rejected simple technological fatalism and called for democratic regulation of biotechnology before markets and individual choice made transformation irreversible. Published amid early twenty-first-century enthusiasm for scientific progress, the book was quietly left behind by the intellectual culture whose technological ambitions it challenged. However, its warnings have grown more urgent in the decades since.

Always with Honor

—Pyotr N. Wrangel

Pyotr N. Wrangel’s memoir emerged from the catastrophe of the Russian Revolution and the White movement’s defeat. Wrangel, a cavalry officer, served during World War I before joining the forces resisting Bolshevik rule. By 1920, he commanded the White armies in southern Russia, inheriting a movement burdened by military reverses, political incoherence, and peasant distrust. Wrangel imposed discipline on his own troops, punishing looting and abuses that had alienated the population, while introducing land reform and building an alternative government rather than simply promising restoration of the old regime. He insisted that the White cause stood for lawful order and national survival against Bolshevik terror. When the Red Army broke through into Crimea, he organized the evacuation of 145,693 soldiers and civilians aboard 126 vessels, saving them from Bolshevik reprisal. His memoirs appeared shortly before his death in 1928, republished as Always with Honor with a foreword by Herbert Hoover, and were reissued in 2024 by Passage Press, renewing modern readers’ access to Wrangel’s first-hand account of the revolution.

The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization

—Patrick J. Buchanan

Patrick J. Buchanan published The Death of the West in 2002, as post-Cold War triumphalism gave way to anxiety about globalization, immigration, and demographic decline. European fertility had fallen below replacement level, America’s foreign-born population was rising, and the cultural conflicts of the 1960s had become embedded in universities, the media, and government. Buchanan synthesized these developments into a single, civilizational argument. The West, he maintained, was not being conquered so much as abandoning the beliefs, loyalties, and confidence required for its survival. Declining birthrates revealed a people unwilling to reproduce themselves; mass immigration transformed nations that had lost the will to assimilate newcomers; and secularism severed Europe and America from their Christian inheritance. The book extended themes Buchanan had developed during his presidential campaigns and placed them within the older tradition of Western decline literature associated with Oswald Spengler. A national bestseller on publication, it receded from mainstream attention despite remaining available through its publisher and used-book market. Its demographic concerns, however, remain central to conservative and populist politics in the West.

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

—Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray

Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray published The Bell Curve in 1994, when debates over welfare, crime, affirmative action, and educational inequality dominated American politics. Advances in psychometrics and longitudinal datasets had encouraged researchers to measure relationships between intelligence and social outcomes. Herrnstein, a Harvard psychologist, and Murray, a political scientist, argued that cognitive ability predicted education, income, employment, criminality, and family stability more powerfully than policymakers admitted. They further maintained that universities and the knowledge economy were concentrating intelligent Americans into a self-contained cognitive elite. The book’s chapters on racial differences in measured IQ ignited controversy, particularly their agnosticism about whether genetic or environmental factors explained group differences. Critics challenged its statistics, definitions of intelligence, treatment of race, and policy conclusions; defenders argued that political discomfort had displaced scientific engagement. Published shortly after Herrnstein’s death, the book became one of the defining American intellectual controversies of the 1990s. Its notoriety ensured continued debate, while later editions kept the book available to readers interested in intelligence, meritocracy, and social stratification.

Witness

—Whittaker Chambers

Whittaker Chambers published Witness in 1952, as the United States confronted Soviet expansion abroad and communist espionage at home. Chambers had joined the communist underground during the 1930s, when capitalism appeared discredited by the Depression and Soviet communism attracted Western intellectuals with promises of historical progress. After breaking with the party and embracing Christianity, he identified Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, as a member of his espionage network. Hiss’s perjury trials became a drama dividing those who saw communist infiltration from those who suspected partisan hysteria. Witness transformed that controversy into a spiritual autobiography. Chambers portrayed communism not merely as a conspiracy or economic doctrine, but as a secular faith promising justice and earthly salvation without God. His defection therefore represented as much a religious conversion as a political shift. The memoir became a bestseller and helped define the moral vocabulary of postwar anti-communism. Later embraced by Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement, it survived changes in political fashion because its treatment of betrayal, faith, history, and conscience reached beyond the Hiss case.

McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning

—William F. Buckley Jr. and L. Brent Bozell Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. and L. Brent Bozell Jr. published McCarthy and His Enemies in March 1954, near the climax of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s power. Revelations concerning Soviet espionage, including the Hiss case and the Rosenberg prosecution, had established that communist penetration of American institutions was real. McCarthy converted that rational fear into a political campaign, combining discoveries with unsupported accusations, procedural recklessness, and attacks on opponents’ loyalty. Buckley and Bozell, Catholic conservatives associated with the postwar Right, attempted to separate the anti-communist case from McCarthy’s conduct. They concluded that many individuals under investigation warranted scrutiny while criticizing McCarthy’s exaggerations, evidentiary standards, and destructive methods. The result was neither a vindication nor repudiation, but a forensic defense of McCarthyism’s central premise. Months later, the televised Army-McCarthy hearings contributed to the senator’s declining national popularity, and the Senate censured him in December. The book became attached to a disgraced figure just as American conservatism sought broader respectability. Its qualified argument remained influential within conservative debates but rarely received sustained mainstream republication.